With the continuous development of business process management technology, the increasing business process models are usually owned by large enterprises. In large enterprises, different stakeholders may modify the same business process model. In order to better manage the changeability of processes, they adopt configurable business process models to manage process variants. However, the process variants will vary with the change in enterprise business demands. Therefore, it is necessary to explore the co-evolution of the process variants so as to effectively manage the business process family. To this end, a novel framework for co-evolution between business process variants through a configurable process model is proposed in this work. First, the mapping relationship between process variants and configurable models is standardized in this study. A series of change operations and change propagation operations between process variants and configurable models are further defined for achieving propagation. Then, an overall algorithm is proposed for achieving co-evolution of process variants. Next, a prototype is developed for managing change synchronization between process variants and configurable process models. Finally, the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed process change propagation method are verified based on experiments on two business process datasets. The experimental results show that our approach implements the co-evolution of process variants with high accuracy and efficiency.

翻译：随着业务流程管理技术的持续发展，大型企业通常拥有日益增多的业务流程模型。在大型企业中，不同利益相关者可能对同一业务流程模型进行修改。为更好地管理流程的可变性，企业采用可配置业务流程模型来管理流程变体。然而，流程变体会随企业业务需求的变化而发生改变。因此，有必要探索流程变体的协同进化，以有效管理业务流程族。为此，本文提出一种通过可配置流程模型实现业务过程变体协同进化的新型框架。首先，本研究标准化了流程变体与可配置模型之间的映射关系。进一步定义了流程变体与可配置模型间的一系列变更操作及变更传播操作以实现传播。随后，提出实现流程变体协同进化的总体算法。在此基础上，开发了一个用于管理流程变体与可配置流程模型之间变更同步的原型系统。最后，基于两个业务流程数据集上的实验，验证了所提过程变更传播方法的有效性和效率。实验结果表明，该方法以高准确率和高效率实现了流程变体的协同进化。